Torre San Giovanni

We ended up in Torre San Giovanni almost by accident, following signs off the main coast road south of Ugento in search of a beach that wasn’t fully booked out by resort umbrellas, and found a small, unhurried town built around a sixteenth-century Aragonese watchtower and a working lighthouse, with a promenade that felt refreshingly local for a spot this close to the more famous white-sand stretches further along the coast.

The tower itself — one of dozens built along this coastline in the sixteenth century as an early-warning system against Ottoman and Barbary raids — stands at the harbour’s edge, squat and weathered, with the taller, more modern lighthouse a short walk beyond it marking the point where the small port curves into open sea. Between the two structures there’s a rocky little headland good for an evening walk, the kind of unremarkable but pleasant stretch you end up returning to every day of a stay without quite planning to.

The beaches here run in both directions from the small centre — sandy stretches with the calm, gently shelving water typical of this part of the Ionian coast, interspersed with rockier sections good for snorkelling closer to the tower. We swam most mornings at a quiet sandy patch a short walk south of the harbour, water warm and glassy-flat most days, with none of the wave action that can make some Adriatic beaches feel more like a workout than a swim.

In the evening the harbour fills modestly with locals and a scattering of Italian holidaymakers rather than international tourists, and the handful of restaurants along the front serve the same unfussy seafood you find up and down this coast — grilled catch of the day, a simple seafood pasta, a carafe of local white. We ate at a small terrace place looking directly at the lit-up tower, the lighthouse beam sweeping past every few seconds, and it felt like one of the more genuinely relaxed evenings of the whole southern Salento leg.

When to go: June through September for reliably calm, warm swimming water. August is busy with domestic tourism but rarely feels crowded in the way the bigger-name Salento beaches do; the shoulder months of June and September are quieter still.